Wednesday, January 21, 1998 - Negative Masters and Window Dubs

Got a crash course on post-production negative conforming by Zachary today. Now I can talk to the fellows that will be conforming the negative and at least understand a bit of what they're talling me.

So many steps really, but it's linear for the most part. They'll need a window dub of the original split into reels, the video dailies with window dub, The EDL which they'll use as a reference, and the all-important negatives. They'll take this material and make a database from it, which should take a little time. Once that's done they'll know what footage is used twice. This footage will need to be duped then transferred and put in to the edit. This duplicate footage will then have its own unique data. Meanwhile titles will also need to be made. The conforming lab will locate the original negative that will be used to make the titles and send this out to the title lab. This new footage with titles layed over will then be used in place of the original, which was titleless.

After the negative is conformed I'll probably then need a positive made then transferred to video. We can then take the DAT audio master (the audio mix will be done by now) and lay this over to make sure that there are no sync problems. Once this is verified and optical negative of the audio can be made and the lab can marry the two and voila, I've got a film.

It's all pretty involved. It pays to have people that know what they're doing.

So I'll need to get the negatives from Monaco and send them along with the video dailies, window dubs split into reels, and EDL to the conforming lab. Meanwhile I need to talk to the conforming lab more about the process and schedule, see what place that makes titles they might recommend, and figure out which lab will be making the final print. I also should talk to Outpost and see how the dialogue edit is coming along.

No wonder so much of the literature that processing labs send out doesn't seem to make much sense. You learn by doing.

-George